'What was a Family?' : Politics, Sexuality and Social Change in Colm Tóibín's The Heather Blazing and his early-1990s journalism (original) (raw)
Related papers
Colm Tóibín and Post-Nationalist Ireland: Redefining Family Through Alterity
Estudios Irlandeses, 2012
In nationalist Ireland, definitions of family have traditionally followed a hetero-normative and sexist pattern whereby husbands and wives fulfilled deeply unequal roles. Moreover, the notion of family has been too often idealized as a site of peace and unconditional love, its members being united by unbreakable bonds of mutual affection. In Colm Tóibín's fiction, " traditional " families tend to be dysfunctional and the relations between their members become strained because of emotional distance, regrets and distrust. However, Tóibín's protagonists do find their sense of home and domesticity outside the traditional parameters of family. In this regard, this paper intends to analyze the manner in which Tóibín destabilizes canonical definitions through his revisionist agenda and his inscription of alternative forms of family. In order to shed light on these points, I shall refer to his novels The South (1990), The Heather Blazing (1992), The Blackwater Lightship (1999) and his short stories " A Long Winter " (Mothers and Sons, 2006), " Two Women " and " The Street " (The Empty Family, 2010).
Gender and Education, 2019
This article examines the perspectives of 14 primary school teachers subjected to a marriage ban in Ireland between 1932 and 1958. This oral history study provides a unique platform to examine the construction and articulation of these women's historical memories. Interrogating their perspectives on the marriage ban provides an important window into the social and cultural world in which they lived, the norms and dominant values they encountered, and the ways in which they negotiated their own individual consciousness within a specific cultural framework. Specifically, the analysis of these women's testimony generates significant insights into the gendering of teaching as a suitable profession for women in early twentieth-century Ireland; how gender shaped social and cultural roles; Church control over women's training and employment; and the use of policy to deepen women's social and economic subordination.
The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order
1999
ferred threat of retributive violence-via the gothic trope of the return of the repressed. This central gothic narrative motif is figured in the novel in the story of Sammy Slipper, a contemporary urban legend that turns on the paranoid gothic tropes of live burial and the living dead. Clarissa's fatal commodificationthat allows me to read the novel as an unauthorized history of the nuclear family. In Burning Your Own, the implications of the nuclear family's am biguous positioning between the public and the private are figured in Mal's parents' endless fighting over what Mal's father fears is his Catholic-sounding name, Malachai. This fight over the significance of increasingly insecure position of the Anglo-Irish in the nineteenth century, the gothic family romance that the irony of Swift, Burke, and Edgeworth expressed and denied became autonomous, split off, and dissociated from the conscious mind of the individual writer and Anglo-Irish consensus reality. This development's purest expression 6 The Gothic Family Romance was in the strand of "paranoid Gothic" (Sedgwick, Between Men 92) that emerged in Ireland during this period. Crucially at issue in this strand of literature are the themes on which I focus in this book: selfconsuming systems, the living dead, the devil's bargain, questions of normative sexuality, and the sacrifice of children. In Chapter 4, I out line dynamics within the Anglo-Irish family and settler colonial order that account for the emergence of a fully autonomous gothic family romance in nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish literature. Through read ings of persecution fantasies involving the sexual sacrifice of children in Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla," and Bram Stoker's Dracula, I explore the workings of the Anglo-Irish gothic family romance. In each text the locus of persecution is situated in a geopolitical space of alterity (early modern Spain, Styria, Transylvania), and each of the persecutors is decisively divorced not only from the Anglo-Irish family but also from humanity itself through vampirism, extreme longevity, and, in two cases, homoeroticism. In these texts, the persecution of children, who are sexually and ideo logically appropriated, cannibalized, and ultimately destroyed within literal or symbolic families, supplies an allegory for the experiences of the settler colonial child. Burning Your Own repeatedly exposes the process underlying the for mation of the paranoid gothic, whereby anxieties originating within the family are projected outside the family, perpetuating sectarian divi sions. For instance, Alex, despite her insight into the repetitive, com pulsive dynamics of abuse within her family, is unable to resist taking on the role of her bigoted, sexist father as a victimizer of socially vul nerable females when she picks a nasty fight with a Catholic waitress in order to release her pent-up grief and rage during an emotionally charged family "celebration" dinner. Alex loudly accuses a waitress of staring at her and then of "grinning"; it seems likely from the man ager's exaggerated championing of Alex, whom he literally shelters with his body from the gaze of the unoffending waitress, that her ir rational and vindictive outburst will cost the young woman a job that is, with Catholic unemployment at over 50 percent, irreplaceable.3 Alex's parents enthusiastically endorse her displacement of familial anxiety outward, onto the Catholic Other. Her mother calls the waitress "a wee Anglo-Irish family has ordered social formation and political and eco nomic allegiances within Ireland. These novels represent a suppressed tradition that specifies the position of women within the settler colo nial order. They depict colonialism as a pervasive historical system that appropriates the sexuality and lives of Anglo-Irish children. In them, (228). He begins to tell Francy the story of Sammy Slipper, asking, in an awkward imitation of his father's opening gambit, "Ever heard of Sammy Slipper?" Francy has not, and The tale tripped out of [Mal], like a spring uncoiling: the dog collapsed, Sammy took it for dead, panicked, buried it, and went off supposedly in search of it. And big, heartbroken Sadie was so ashamed at having done him down in the past that she got her father to do a wee bit to the garden as a reward. (228) When Mal gets to the point in the story when he expects Francy to ask how the dog stayed alive underground, he is taken aback when Francy as an allegory for the position of Irish women, ends on a hopeful note, whereas Patterson's reflections on his experiences as a Protestant child in Northern Ireland close on a scene of desolation, with Francy's family and other Catholic families driven out of the housing estate and with Francy's terrible, final act of self-immolation. In the novel's last scene, Francy publicly and spectacularly destroys himself, lobbing sev eral petrol bombs into the Protestant ranks before setting his own body ablaze, thereby exiting an order that sustained acts of will and imagi Index
2012
The editors of Neo-Victorian Familes, Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, have undertaken an extensive and worthy endeavour in editing a neo-Victorian book series for Rodopi. A burgeoning field within both Victorian and contemporary literary and cultural criticism, Neo-Victorian Studies examines intriguing re-appropriations of Victorian culture that began as soon as Victoria died and have continued to proliferate vigorously. Because the Victorian age brought great changes for children through the enactment of laws limiting child labour, raising the age of consent, and providing for compulsory education, negotiating this cultural shift regarding children preoccupied many Victorian writers. Neo-Victorian literature, films, and theatre have taken up the nineteenth-century 'cult of the child' to reexamine it, critique it, and to use it as a lens to consider current attitudes and policies toward children and families, as the essays in this volume show. We need sustained and serious analysis of what such reworking of the Victorian experience suggests, both about the nineteenth century itself and about the century-plus since, which have had such constitutive impact on our current understanding of kinship, guardianship, identity, and even on our definitions of what is a 'child' and what is a 'family'. This particular volume, Neo-Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual and Cultural Politics, focuses on the depiction of the family in the neo-Victorian
A Tie that Blinds; Family and Ideology in Ireland
This paper examines the origins of the role of the family as a social symbol in Irish society. The source, it argues, is in the nature of the inequalities that were present in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland. These were not simply through classes but also through families. The ideology of the family emerged to deny and to displace the tensions created by the nature of these kinds of inequalities.
UNMARRIED MOTHERS MARRYING IRELAND: SUBVERSIVE STRATEGIES IN EDNA O'BRIEN'S LITERATURE
Edna O'Brien's name is inextricably linked to references to rural Ireland and women's sexuality, exile and divorce. In one word, controversy is what has defined this author's work for many years in her native Ireland and abroad. Her writing has been considered fresh and poetic and her constant treatment of female characters and their struggles has given her a place in the literary canon in English McMahon 1977;. But what gives O'Brien's writing a special touch is her treatment of women's issues in a particular context: the Irish one. The conjunction of the Irish heritage and Irish women protagonists allows new and multiple interpretations and recreations of "Irishness" that the author has explored expertly. This article focuses on one of her most recent novels, Wild Decembers, and the unavoidable connections that exist between the matter of the land and the feminine representation of the nation, now embodied in Breege, its female protagonist.